Markus Bacher: After Eight

Cat. CFA Berlin

Exhibition catalogue, edited by CFA Berlin
text (German/English) by Veit Loers
56 p with 35 coloured illustrations
320 x 325 mm, half-bound

ISBN 978-3-86442-051-1

(out of print)

Painting is just another way of talking

»Becoming can be emergence and decay. Bacher’s images derive their visual potential in these ­vicissitudes; they are fluid«, writes Veit Loers in his introductory text for the first book on Markus ­Bacher, who was born in 1983 in Kitzbühl, Tyrol and now lives in Vienna and Cologne, and whose abstract painting is particularly characterised by its reflection of the broad historical context. In terms of other artist positions, Markus Bacher’s abstractions  – their brush stroke and then a pause as a conscious artistic act, their use of colour as the background noise for these blow-ups of graphic ideas – are based on the pictorial observations by Pierre Soulages and Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly, Günther Förg or Gerhard Richter, lastly, Albert Oehlen and Herbert Brandl. They become wrapped up local and clayey tones, engender spatial worlds in broad brush strokes, often horizontal broad layers containing fine ­island-like flourishes of colour in the overall motion of which that arrest the eye. »Paint­ing is just another way of talking,« the artist says, describing the process of painting as a permanent conver­sation, an exchange of ­experiences. In spite of every ­possible appropri­ation, his work is still ­primarily about understand­ing the appear­ance of paint and colour as something that is not as such completely absorbed in itself. Instead there’s a permanent iri­descence, and, as Veit Loers de­s­cribes it, »a numinous meaning flashes to the fore, but remains ­suspended«; and it shines through the artist’s homeland, the Alps, and we behold lakes, moss-covered rocks, glinting stones in a mountain stream or a dark forest ­interior.